LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL, THE, the chief magistracy of the Commonwealth, presiding over the Council of State (q.v.) of one-and-twenty and holding, by design, no power the Frame (q.v.) does not name: elected by both houses sitting together, removable by both houses on the same terms, and furnished with none of the appurtenances — standing guard, household, private purse — that the office's first holder thought it prudent to decline and that every successor since has found it difficult, whatever his own private inclination, to be the first to reclaim. It is deliberately unlike any first minister to a crown, and deliberately unlike the office it replaced: no Lord President has ever commanded an army in his own right, and none has held the office for a term the Rota could not, on a bare majority, have brought to an early end.
Sir Henry Vane (q.v.), who held it first, from the Settlement of 1660 to 1666, set the pattern of a restrained Presidency that his successors have generally professed to follow, with varying fidelity to the profession. Vane was succeeded by Sir Edward Massingham (1666-1674), whose eight years in the office are chiefly remembered for the quiet consolidation of the Council's own procedure rather than for any measure that has kept his name current outside the Rota's own archive, and by Algernon Sidney (q.v.), whose nine years (1674-1683) this Commonwealth counts, with Vane's, among the two tenures the office has never had cause to regret. Hugh Delacourt (1683-1701) presided over the Presidency's most testing early passage, the years of the Remonstrance and the negotiations that produced the Second Frame (q.v.), and Sir Robert Ashworth (1701-1723) saw the Western Provinces' representation settle into the ordinary business of the Committee of the Plantations rather than the crisis it had lately been.
The eighteenth century's greater trial fell to Marmaduke Selwyn (1751-1766), whose Presidency spanned the whole of the Great Atlantic War (q.v.) and the anxious Reapportionment Quarrels (q.v.) that followed its victory, a combination of foreign triumph and domestic arithmetic this contributor's predecessors have judged, on the whole, the office's most consequential single tenure since Vane's own. Sir Charles Osgood (1834-1846) presided through the gravest trial of all, the Severance (q.v.) and the first years of the Reconstitution (q.v.), an office he is recorded to have held, in the private judgment of more than one Council colleague whose papers this contributor has consulted, with considerably more anguish than the even public record of his conduct discloses. The Presidency has passed through several further hands since, of settled competence and no great occasion for particular remark, to Sir Aubrey Chetwynd, who has held it since 1901 and presides over the Council as this edition goes to press.
The office's true continuity, this contributor would submit, lies less in any one holder's particular distinction than in the plain fact that no Lord President, across two hundred and fifty years and a dozen or more tenures this article has not troubled to itemise in full, has ever yet required the Rota to test whether its power to end a Presidency early was more than a theoretical one. Whether that unbroken record reflects the wisdom of every holder or merely the good sense of an office built, from Vane's own first year, to give a would-be tyrant remarkably little to be tyrannous with, the present writer leaves to the reader's own judgment of human nature rather than to any further evidence this article is able to supply. (E. H. V.)